Benjamin Blaquart
Benjamin Blaquart lives and works in Paris (FR) and Brussels (BE).
Using synthetic materials of artifice and new media technologies to re-invest them sensibly, Benjamin Blaquart creates transgender installations and objects: sculpture, websites, video, music. These creations are defined as space-time that psychologically appropriate and subvert the worlds of digital and artificial environments, like theme parks. He is interested in special effects and scenarized spaces such as shopping malls, video games, and churches, for their ability to produce reality and new perceptions of the body and psyche. By integrating their strategies, he immerses the viewer in works that are sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes contemplative. Through the symbolic and the imaginary, he connects universes (the grotesque and science fiction, psychoanalysis and horror films…) that were never meant to cross paths, making them mutate into an electronic baroque. Provoking back-and-forths between analog and digital, interior and exterior, Benjamin Blaquart breaks the superficiality of entertainment aesthetics to charge them emotionally and reveal repressed elements.
A graduate of Villa Arson and the research program La Seine (ENSBA), Benjamin Blaquart held a solo exhibition at the Brussels Art Center in 2014 and participated in several major international exhibitions at Quai Branly (FR), Athen Contemporary Art Center (USA), and Kunsthalle Bonn (DE). He is also preparing, alongside architect Pierre De Brun, a project blending prospective architecture, design, visual identity, and commercial language, which will be exhibited in Brussels in 2015.
